Description Sandip Chitale 2008-08-31 13:04:34 EDT

There are two template varaibles:

${word_selection}
${line_selection}

There needs to be an third variable called:

${selection}

This basically replaces whatever the text selection in was when the template was about to be inserted.

Also to be useful the Surround with... action should use templates that contains the ${selection} variable. That is because it should be possible to insert
such templates using menu item, keybingd or mouse only operation such that the 
selection is not destroyed in the process of invoking the action to select the template to insert.

In fact why is Surround with... action limited to templates containing ${line_selection} only? Why not ${word_selection}?

Here is the implementation of the ${selection} resolver:

package somepackage;

import org.eclipse.jface.text.ITextSelection;
import org.eclipse.jface.text.templates.TemplateContext;
import org.eclipse.jface.text.templates.TemplateVariableResolver;
import org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ISelection;
import org.eclipse.ui.IEditorPart;
import org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI;
import org.eclipse.ui.texteditor.ITextEditor;

public class SelectionVariableResolver extends TemplateVariableResolver {
	protected String resolve(TemplateContext context) {
		 IEditorPart editorPart = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getActiveWorkbenchWindow().getActivePage().getActiveEditor();
		if (editorPart instanceof ITextEditor) {
			ITextEditor textEditor = (ITextEditor) editorPart;
			ISelection selection = textEditor.getSelectionProvider().getSelection();
			if (selection instanceof ITextSelection) {
				ITextSelection textSelection = (ITextSelection) selection;
				return textSelection.getText();
			}
		 }
		return getType();
	}
}

and the extension:

   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.editors.templates">
      <resolver
            class="somepackage.SelectionVariableResolver"
            contextTypeId="java"
            description="Resolves to the selection."
            icon="icons/selection.gif"
            name="selection"
            type="selection">
      </resolver>
   </extension>